Uncle Ted’s Family Tradition

Retired Archbishop Ted McCarrick has been accused of sexually abusing children and adult seminarians while a high profile church leader. (PBS News Hour screenshot)

Handsy Archbishop (formerly Cardinal) Ted McCarrick’s name did not come up in the Pennsylvania grand jury report, but his shadow looms large over the burgeoning scandal engulfing the US bishops. McCarrick loved for seminarians and priests to call him “Uncle Ted” — an endearment he also instructed “James,” a man he began molesting when James was only 11, to call him.

Uncle Ted will not be going to Pope Francis’s World Meeting of Families in Dublin later this month, but some of his clerical family will be present.

The Associated Press reports that Washington’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl is facing trouble on two fronts: one having to do with his failures to police clerical molesters as Bishop of Pittsburgh, and the other related to his hard-to-credit claim that he had no idea that McCarrick, his predecessor in Washington, was a known molester — this, despite two claims having been quietly settled by the dioceses of Newark and Metuchen.

Cardinal Wuerl is set to speak at the World Meeting of Families in Dublin later this month:

Judging from the grand jury report, there are some families in the Diocese of Pittsburgh who would question Donald Wuerl’s credentials to speak on the welfare of the family.

Also speaking at the World Meeting of Families: Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark and curial Cardinal Kevin Farrell. Tobin — he of the infamous “Nighty-night baby, I love you” tweet — is a successor of McCarrick’s, and as such, knew or should have known about the settlements with his victims, at least from the time of his 2017 installation in Newark. Farrell was an auxiliary bishop in Washington under McCarrick, and has publicly credited McCarrick as a mentor. Though he shared a flat with Uncle Ted in DC, Farrell has publicly denied that he had the slightest inkling that McCarrick was a molester.

I don’t believe it for a second. Even if it happens to be true, well, demonstrate it somehow. I will not believe it until and unless it is demonstrated.

The religious priest who spoke to CNA said when he studied in a seminary in New York, McCarrick, who was then an aide to Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York, would sometimes visit the seminary. The priest said that McCarrick’s reputation was already well established by this time.

“The dean of our theology school was a classmate at CUA with McCarrick, and he knew about the rumors,” the priest told CNA, “he spoke about them with the other faculty and theologians very openly.”

So well-known was McCarrick’s reputation, the priest said, that when McCarrick would accompany Cooke to visit the seminary there was a standing joke that they had to “hide the handsome ones” before he arrived.

The same reputation reportedly followed the archbishop years later, when he served from 1986-2000 as Archbishop of Newark. One priest of the Archdiocese of Newark told CNA it was an uncomfortable experience when McCarrick came to visit the seminary.

The priest said that McCarrick would often place his hand on seminarians while talking with them, or on their thighs while seated near them.

“It was really unnerving. On the one hand you knew – knew – what was going on but you couldn’t believe it.”

More about the world McCarrick and his successor John Myers — a conservative! — sustained:

Three Newark priests independently gave CNA nearly identical accounts of being invited to these parties when they were newly ordained.

One recalled that he attended a cocktail party, thinking he had been invited to a simple priests’ dinner. “I was led into the room to a chorus of wolf-whistles,” he said. “It was clear right away I was ‘on display.’”

Another priest told CNA that he was also invited to a party hosted by the priest. “They were all carrying big mixed drinks, pink ones, it was like something out of Sex in City.”

He recalled that after asking for a beer, he was told by his host, “you need to try something more girly tonight.”

All recounted overtly sexual conversation at the cocktail parties. “I was fresh meat and they were trying me out,” one priest said.

All three said they left quickly upon realizing what was going on. “Everyone was getting loaded and getting closer on the couches, I wanted out of there,” a priest told CNA.

“Everyone kept calling me a ‘looker’ and saying they had to ‘keep me around’ from now on,” a third Newark priest told CNA.

The archdiocese declined to answer questions related to those parties.

All three priests told CNA that while the experience was deeply unpleasant, they had seen similar behavior in Newark’s seminary.

Seminarians and priests from ordination classes spanning 30 years, during the terms of McCarrick and Myers, reported to CNA that they had observed an active homosexual subculture of priest and seminarians within Newark’s Immaculate Conception Seminary.

One priest ordained in the early years of McCarrick’s term in Newark said that “a lot of people lost their innocence in the seminary.”

He told CNA that there were two distinct groups of students. “You had the men who were there because they had a deep love of the Lord and a vocation to serve his Church,” he said, adding that those men were the majority of seminarians.

“But there was a subculture, with its own group of men, that was openly homosexual and petty and vindictive with everyone else,” he explained.

The priests say things have improved at the Newark seminary, but that a lot of the bad guys were ordained, and are in ministry today:

As for the problems with priests already in ministry, the priests agreed it was demoralizing, for priests and lay Catholics alike.

One said that priests living unfaithful lives are a scandal playing out “with the mute button on.”

“Our people aren’t stupid. They know who their pastors are, for good and bad. They know who drinks too much, they know if their priest is celibate or not. But they see nothing is done about it and they understand that the Church doesn’t mean what it says, or even care.”

I’m telling you, if the media ever start really digging into the life and times of Theodore McCarrick, and examining the system that produced him, and that he sustained, they are going to expose malicious networks of sexually active gay priests who use their power to protect and promote their kind. The late Richard Sipe wrote about the “genealogy” of sex abuse among clergy — see here for the basics — which was his way of characterizing the systemic, intergenerational way that patterns of abuse pass down through the Catholic priesthood. Powerful clergy — bishops and others — who are sexually active permit sexual activity among their priests, and recruit others to join in.

Cardinal Francis Spellman, who ruled the Archdiocese of New York from 1939 to 1967, was widely known in clerical circles for his active homosexuality. A personal friend of mine attended a gay party at the archbishop’s mansion on Fifth Avenue, and was given a tour of the place by His Eminence. One of the stories told about Spellman was that he was once asked by a gay lover how he thought he could get away with his double life. Spellman answered, “Who would believe it?”

Indeed, who would? Spellman was famously anti-communist and rigidly moralistic — in public. When I was working in New York, I heard stories about him from people like my friend, as well as from a Catholic cop, that had never been made public, but which were right in line with those that had been publicized. In the third volume of her provocatively titled 2006 book The Rite Of Sodomy, Catholic writer Randy Engel takes a deep dive into the Spellman legacy, and the role of homosexuality in the Catholic hierarchy of the Boston-New York axis in the 20th century. Spellman ordained McCarrick, whose rise to power began when he served as personal secretary to Cardinal Terence Cooke, Spellman’s successor.

Spellman’s homosexuality is no secret. What I learned from Engel’s book — which is much better researched and argued than the bomb-throwing title would lead you to believe — is that Cardinal William O’Connell, archbishop of Boston from 1907 to 1944, was gay. So too was Cardinal John Wright, made an auxiliary bishop of Boston in 1947 under O’Connell’s successor, Cardinal Richard Cushing. Wright went on to become the Bishop of Worcester, Mass. Engel writes:

From the time Pius XII made John Wright the first Bishop of the new Diocese of Worcester, the diocese has remained a clerical pederast’s paradise.

Anyone who has spent even a small amount of time tracking clerical sex abusers on the Internet cannot help but be impressed with the number of times the Diocese of Worcester pops up on the screen. To date there have been at least 50 cases of clerical sex abuse reported in the diocese, mostly diocesan priests who attended St. John’s Seminary in Brighton and a handful that received their formation and training for the priesthood at the North American College in Rome.

Engel collects a lot of data on Wright, who moved on to become Bishop of Pittsburgh in 1959, and then migrated to Rome in 1969 to become a cardinal and the highest-ranking American in the Roman Curia. He participated in the conclave that elected Pope John Paul II, but because he was ill and confined to a wheelchair, his personal secretary, Monsignor Donald Wuerl, was allowed to accompany him into the conclave. Wright died in 1979.

Here is something startling from Engel’s book:

To the best of my knowledge, even though Wright’s pederastic predilections were an “open secret” in the Archdiocese of Boston and its satellite dioceses of Worcester and Springfield for many years, no one has come forward to accuse him of sexual abuse until now.

His accuser is Mr. William Burnett, whose uncle, Rev. Raymond Page, served under Bishop Wright in Worcester and whose exploits we have already detailed in connection with Bishop Weldon.

According to Burnett, his uncle-priest owned a rustic private lakeshore retreat that he had built from an old cabin on the Massaconnet Shores of Hamilton Reservoir in Holland, Mass. When I asked him what he recalled about the lodge, Burnett said he remembered that the living-room/den was covered with heavy area rugs.

Burnett said that Bishop Wright was a regular guest at Page’s private retreat when he was there. He said like most Catholics, he was in awe of the bishop.

Burnett agreed to provide this writer with details of his sexual abuse at the hands of Wright and Page even though he said it was a difficult thing to do.

The following descriptions of acts perpetrated on young Bill Burnett are not related as an exercise in idle prurient interest. Rather they are intended to show the absolute depravity of the acts committed against Bill Burnett at the hands of his own uncle and that of Bishop Wright, and to ask the reader about how he would feel if William had been his own son.

Burnett stated that the abuse ritual began with drinks, a coke for him and coke and alcohol for Page and Wright. Wright would then undress him, fall on his knees before the standing boy and cover him with kisses.

I don’t want to publish here the pornographic details — not on this blog. They’re in Engel’s book, and she’s right: she doesn’t post them for prurient reasons, but to compel readers to understand exactly what we’re talking about here. Let’s just say that according to Burnett, Wright and Page engaged in various sexual acts with him, as a boy, and with each other. Regarding the boy Burnett, we’re talking about rape. More Engel:

When it was all over, Wright handed Bill a $20 bill like he always did.

Significantly, Burnett said that Bishop Wright encouraged him to study for the priesthood for the Diocese of Worcester when he graduated from high school.

According to Burnett, his abuse at the hands of Wright and Page occurred mainly from 1952 to 1955.

Donald Wuerl became private secretary to Bishop Wright not long after his 1966 ordination. He moved into Wright’s residence in Pittsburgh, and of course followed him to Rome, after Wright was named Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy — that is, head of the Vatican’s apparatus for overseeing priests worldwide. The New York Times obituary for the cardinal said:

Meanwhile, he enjoyed the trappings of his post in the Vatican. He shared his fifth‐floor apartment with his secretary, the Rev. Donald Wuerl, whom he had taken with him from Pittsburgh. The apartment was said to be crammed with stereo equipment and his many books. Cardinal Wright enjoyed long conversations over a large dinner of pasta and he once said that he “confessed to Romanitas.” [In this context, affection for the culture and style of Vatican life. — RD]

Guilt by association is a fallacy. We do not know that Cardinal Wuerl is gay, or personally guilty of any sexual misconduct. I am not here asserting, or even insinuating, that he is.

But there is reason to believe that Wuerl’s great mentor, spiritual father, and patron, the cardinal he served for 13 years, was an active homosexual, and indeed — on Bill Burnett’s testimony — a pederast. What, if anything, did Donald Wuerl know about Cardinal Wright’s private life? Was Wright personally compromised? What did Wright teach him about how to think about sexual activity among priests? Given what Richard Sipe has said about the “genealogical” aspect of clerical sexual abuse and misconduct — that is, this phenomenon passing down through the clerical ranks by sexually active prelates and seminary rectors recruiting and promoting those who share their sexual enthusiasm — the questions ought to be asked.

As Sipe tirelessly argued, sexual disorder among priests, cloaked by a veil of secrecy, provides a hothouse culture into which sexual criminal behavior with minors can thrive. Most sexually active priests would never molest a minor, but the importance of keeping their own sexual sins hidden made them likely to turn a blind eye when other priests did harm minors.

It is a massive, massive crisis. How was McCarrick allowed to rise through the hierarchy despite the countless warnings to both his fellow bishops and the Vatican that he was a sexual predator? Who knew? Who helped him? The same conspiracy of silence that allowed sexual predators to flourish in Wuerl’s Pittsburgh diocese for decades also allowed McCarrick to become, until just a few weeks ago, one of the most powerful American cardinals, even in retirement.

This is not just a matter of getting rid of a few bad apples. There is a ring of abusers and their enablers in the Catholic hierarchy that must be rooted out. Every report of abuse that was overlooked or ignored, every abuse that was covered up with a nondisclosure agreement, must be exposed. The bishops and cardinals who ignored or covered up abuses are complicit and must be removed. The church must be cleansed, and the conspiracy of silence ended.

Exactly right. Again and again: the only way to do that is to start digging deep into the root networks. I was told to read Engel’s book by a prominent Catholic layman, who said she really is onto something with Wuerl and Wright. I had not seen the book before because based on the title alone, I figured it was something fringey, which it kind of is, but much less so than I expected. When I mentioned that to a priest who teaches in one of the leading Catholic universities, he said to me, “Ross Douthat was right: If you want to know the truth about these things, you have to go to the fringes.”

It was the early 2000s, I was attending some earnest panel on religion, and I was accosted by a type who haunts such events — gaunt, intense, with a litany of esoteric grievances. He was a traditionalist Catholic, a figure from the church’s fringes, and he had a lot to say, as I tried to disentangle from him, about corruption in the Catholic clergy. The scandals in Boston had broken, so some of what he said was familiar, but he kept going, into a rant about Cardinal McCarrick: Did you know he makes seminarians sleep with him? Invites them to his beach house, gets in bed with them …

At this I gave him the brushoff that you give the monomaniacal and slipped out.

That was before I realized that if you wanted the truth about corruption in the Catholic Church, you had to listen to the extreme-seeming types, traditionalists and radicals, because they were the only ones sufficiently alienated from the institution to actually dig into its rot. (This lesson has application well beyond Catholicism.)

I’ll end with this. The late Richard Sipe was very much a progressive Catholic. He thought there was nothing morally wrong about homosexuality, wanted to see celibacy ended, and the clerical closet closed for business. He had no complaint at all about gay priests. What he hated was lies, double lives, and exploitation. On that last point, he and conservative Catholics would agree.

It is time to disrupt Uncle Ted’s family tradition. Uncover the dirt, expose the roots, depose corrupted prelates, dismiss from the priesthood those who will not live cleanly and faithfully. The fate of this family is decisive for the future of the Catholic Church.

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145 Responses to Uncle Ted’s Family Tradition

Re: The available empirical evidence is that the incidence of sexual abuse skyrocketed soon after the clergy largely abandoned ascetical practices in the 1960s.

Hopeful Trad,
You really do need to read more history. There have been eras when corrupt and sinful (and BLATANTLY sinful) clergy makes today’s reprobates look like choir boys. Look at what the Church was like in France under the late ancien regime, when elevating a lecher like Talleyrand to a bishopric was par for the course. Or of course during the Renaissance. Or in the century or so before Gregory VII finally cleaned house with massive reforms. Probably the amount, and specific nature, of sinning has fluctuated, but there has never been an era when there was very little of it. Even the persecuted, pre-Constantinian church had its problems. So no, this is not about the 60s or Vatican II.

“There was no legitimate reason why Spellman could not have read the riot act to FDR over the latter’s craven appeasement of Stalin, more especially after the Katyn massacre. Spellman did nothing of the kind.”

Roosevelt was not Catholic and he would have read the riot act right back at him. Spellman was smart enough to know when to keep his mouth shut, assuming he cared in the first place.

do the PA revelations show that the amount of underage predation by priests is a greater percentage than, say, among public school teachers, or any other group that has regular exposure to children and teens? I’d like to see real information on this.

We’d all like to see some reliable numbers on this, but it probably isn’t likely.

This claim – that priests are no worse than teachers or other secular people who work with kids – was much asserted in 2002. The problems with the comparison are obvious. We don’t really have complete numbers on kids molested by priests. And even more so, we don’t have numbers on kids molested by teachers, etc. Most sexual abuse seems to happen inside the family anyway, where there is little or no documentation.

Suppose it could be proven, though, that priests are no worse than (and, no better than) public school teachers. I would find that of very little comfort, considering the dignity of the priesthood, and the pretensions which are made for it by the Church.

Every hierarchical organization with absolute control over the lives of its members fills up with deviants of some kind eventually. The RCC was built for sexual predators like La Cosa Nostra was built for anti-social personalities and psychopaths. New Age cults, including those with pretensions of origins in ancient faiths, are full of stories of abuse. Read Jack Kornfield’s “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry” for a laundry list of groups with Far Eastern origins that crashed and burned over this stuff. (Years after his book came out, the one guy he singled out as being the exception, Dainin Katagiri Roshi, was outed as having had multiple affairs with students – and he was married.) It still goes on. The difference is that the RCC has a network and culture that developed over 2000 years, so, is much more well developed, especially in its ability to keep,these crimes hidden.

The very issue that so many Christians here have faith in, handing over otherworldly authority to flesh and blood human beings, is behind this. It will always be a set-up for abuse. Authority needs constant checks and balances.

Did everyone catch the prize of a statement from the Newark Archdiocese in the update to the CNA story?

“Update:

On Aug. 17, after the publication of this story, a representative of the Archdiocese of Newark provided this statement to Catholic News Agency:

“The priest who had worked at St. Andrew’s College was going through a personal crisis and received therapy after the incident at the seminary. Although he is not serving as a pastor, he has been deemed fit for priestly ministry and hopes to serve as a hospital chaplain.”

“No one – including the anonymous ‘sources’ cited in the article – has ever spoken to Cardinal Tobin about a “gay sub-culture” in the Archdiocese of Newark.”

Scare quotes, personal crisis, and therapy. Hits all the points. Still going with the passive aggressive early 2002 style dismissal.

Seems like Hebda might be a genuine good egg. Anyone know how things have gone in Minneapolis post-Neinstedt?

To put it more bluntly:
This stance so many seem to consider defensive of looking around suspiciously for priests or bishops who may be gay or are rumored to be gay, and not only tarring them with that information alone (or misinformation, as the case may be) but using it to implicate them in the crimes of other gay priests or bishops whose paths crossed with theirs in the small world of church government is not only problematic, it’s the essence of bias. You can’t use this form of reasoning in an American court of law for good reason.

What’s more, if you’re doing this in an attempt to to bolster the traditionalist position on sexual morality by somehow making a connection between gays in the clergy and support for a more lenient position on homosexuality, the strategy can easily backfire, since, historically, gay Catholic bishops (including McConnell and Spellman, if they can be so identified) and Vatican (Curia) officials have been among the staunchest supporters of traditional sexual morality, as well as state laws mirroring Catholic teaching…and publicly at least, the harshest opponents of homosexuals and homosexual rights.

I’d love to see the Latin Church successfully adopt the Eastern tradition for celibacy. But I fear there is far too little understanding of that tradition and too much noise in our culture to make it work.

Simon —

I think that the biggest issues are pragmatic ones. The Latin church is currently organized around a celibate priesthood — I mean in terms of how large parishes often are, how much demand is placed on the priest’s time (after all, he doesn’t have a wife and kids), how often priests are moved around, finances and so on. In order to accommodate large numbers of married priests, the Latin church would have to change a lot of things — these guys need more money to raise a family, more time to raise a family, and more stability to raise a family than celibate priests do. Also there is the issue of the priest-wife — a powerful unofficial position in any Orthodox parish, but not one that the Latin church has any tradition of dealing with. So the system would need to be changed to accommodate that — you can’t just throw married priests into the current Latin set-up — doesn’t work.

I do think that allowing married men to become priests is a part of the answer here for the Latin church, but it not a short-term solution because there would need to be these other changes in order to accommodate married priests.

There has got to be a way to pull the correct thread so all this unravels. I’m surprised no one has put private detectives on any of these bishops up until now. We have to use whatever means necessary to take them down and get at the truth.

Thanks, Rod for staying on this. It’s heartbreaking but shining the light of truth is so necessary.

“Rod, one small thing you could do in your writing is jettison the word ‘gay’ (which is, you know, happy and normalizing) in favor of the more telling ‘homosexual'”

Not so. ‘Homosexual’ is a bastard word formation–a Greek prefix stuck awkwardly onto a Latin root. ‘Television’ is another such word. The best terminology is ‘homoerote’, ‘homoerotism’, and ‘homoerotic’. But ‘gay’ isn’t always happy and normal; a ‘gay lady’, in Victorian pornography, was understood to be a streetwalker. So if the homoerotes like this semi-sinister term, I say let them be welcome to it.

JonF: Talleyrand was a “lecher”, ok, that much is established. That’s worse than making a naked prepubescent boy pose as Our Lord on the cross? Worse than grooming a baby from the day of his baptism to be “my special boy”? Worse than anointing another boy with semen? Really? OK. Your “Hopeful Trad” correspondent is wrong, but in this case so are you. I can’t see how the American Catholic Church can be characterized as better than anything, this side of human sacrifice, and at this point none of us can rule anything out.

Re: So if the homoerotes like this semi-sinister term, I say let them be welcome to it.

My general rule of thumb is that, for the sake of linguistic simplicity and vigor, a short and simple (but non-obscene) word is to be preferred to a long and complicated one. For this reason I do use “gay” in preference to anything else, and also prefer “Black” to “African-American”.

Ginger: The original comment was also wrong anyway. The statement asserted the independence of Catholic universities and is often said to have laid the groundwork for future dissent, but it was not about Humanae Vitae (and hardly could have been, since it was a year before).

Andy McKendry says “You’ve mentioned before your dismay at the destruction of the monasteries etc in England by Henry VIII. If you read the accounts written at that time about the monasteries etc is it any wonder people were happy when they were destroyed?”

No. The “accounts written at the time” were the ones that were considered acceptable to publish at that time. A large late-20th century “revisionist” historiography (based on documentary evidence) of the Reformation in Britain has shown that the people of Britain were not, at least initially, keen to embrace the reforms of the Reformers. In fact, there were downright hostile to those reforms. They changed over time, of course, and as a result of exposure to relentless Tudor propaganda. Still, the people of Britain were Catholics in the early 16th century.

I ran across a picture of Pius XII in the ’50s the other day meeting with a group of plastic surgeons. He pronounced that having plastic surgery just for cosmetic effect was morally evil.

Right. How many trad prelates would stick up for that? How many wives of big-time contributors would force hubby to re-direct funds if they were scolded for face-lift, tummy tuck, etc?

My point is, moral values change and so do practices. The last papal castrato died in the late 19th century. By that time castration had been a violation of God’s plan for over a thousand years. At least officially.

You’ve got a problem here. Deal with it–stop imagining a perfect past. Some body last week or the week before quoted part of a diatribe again clerical homosexuals by Pius V. But in that same outburst he threatened any Catholic who opposed “heretics” (he meant Protestants) being executed.

Roosevelt was not Catholic and he would have read the riot act right back at him. Spellman was smart enough to know when to keep his mouth shut, assuming he cared in the first place.

In addition, Roosevelt’s appeasement of Stalin was predicated on the knowledge that twenty million Russian soldiers were dying to take down a roughly equal portion of the Wehrmacht, which would make things much less bloody for the GI’s at and after the Normandy landings. Katyn has been talked about ever since the end of WW II, but deferring the subject for a couple of years didn’t hurt any. Those Polish officers were dead before the U.S. even declared war on anyone.

““There was no legitimate reason why Spellman could not have read the riot act to FDR over the latter’s craven appeasement of Stalin, more especially after the Katyn massacre. Spellman did nothing of the kind.”
”
Yeah, I’m sure that a damn papist “reading the riot act” to FDR during a war in which Soviets were doing most of the fighting and the country most associated with Catholicism was fighting on the other side would have been warmly received by the general public…

“What’s more, if you’re doing this in an attempt to to bolster the traditionalist position on sexual morality by somehow making a connection between gays in the clergy and support for a more lenient position on homosexuality, the strategy can easily backfire, since, historically, gay Catholic bishops (including McConnell and Spellman, if they can be so identified) and Vatican (Curia) officials have been among the staunchest supporters of traditional sexual morality, as well as state laws mirroring Catholic teaching…and publicly at least, the harshest opponents of homosexuals and homosexual rights”

Right. Traditionalists here are obviously expecting that the discovery that a large proportion of Catholic priests are sexually active and are blackmailing each other to silence is going to create havoc with the “gay agenda.” But what’s this discovery is actually going to do is a) trigger a tidal wave of schadenfreude and b) reinforce the popular notion that homophobes are all closet cases.

“I know we have gotten pretty far afield from the original point of this post, but since JFK was not a resident of the Archdiocese of New York, Cardinal Spellman never had any jurisdiction over him.”

..and, to put it mildly, Catholic prelates were not in the position to excommunicate the first (and only!) Catholic president for not putting the interests of the Church ahead of the interests of the nation..

March Hare, and the others who imagine that this has nothing to do with Vatican II and everything that went with it, read this:

Brother Philip Carmody played a significant role in Christian Brothers history, a role hidden until Coldrey’s report. The order had arrived in Australia in 1868, its charter to look after disadvantaged boys. It was also seen as an advantage to bring more Catholics into the country.

On April 28, 1915, Carmody arrived in Perth from Sydney, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, to teach at St Vincent’s Orphanage, Clontarf in inner-city Subiaco. Clontarf’s residents were then mainly wards of the state before the child migrants were moved there in 1938.

When Carmody went on annual leave on Boxing Day 1918, numerous boys came forward to report he had been sexually abusing them.

The predator was dismissed immediately, sent back to Sydney and the police notified.

Police arrested him in NSW and extradited him to Perth where he was jailed for nine years after pleading guilty to three counts of “indecent dealing beyond the course of nature”. The judge said it was the “most revolting” case he had seen.

Carmody had become the first Christian Brother to be charged and convicted of sex abuse in Australia. As Coldrey recounts in his report, the case was also remarkable for the way it was handled — perfectly.

Correspondence shows Perth’s Archbishop Patrick Clune was worried the opposition would call for a royal commission into the affair.

After Carmody was dismissed, the Superior-General of the order was told of “the big scandal”, child welfare officers were called in and the entire staff of the orphanage changed, even though none of the others had been involved in the abuse.

As anybody can see, the things that changed were that the normal Catholic reaction to such sin went AWOL, and instead sodomites were welcomed, protected, and promoted.

Spelly was a sodomite, there’s no suggestion that he was a pederast. But his secret would certainly explain his lack of capacity to issue appropriate correction to Roosevelt, Kennedy, and many others. He could be pressured, and no doubt was.

Wright, of course, was one of the three cardinals who constituted the kangaroo court that condemned Archbishop Lefebvre…

Let’s pretend we’re surprised, just for the sake of the tender liberals who think these issues are all distinct and unrelated.

To put all this into context, it may help to look at the Jimmy Savile case. Everybody who had the power to do something about it knew, but did nothing, and they all professed surprise and shock afterwards.

But rock and roll and impurity always went together, so it was all right. Or something.

The modernist heretics protecting abusers in clerical ranks were somewhat amateur in comparison with the BBC and countless other British institutions, including numerous hospitals.

Rew: . A large late-20th century “revisionist” historiography (based on documentary evidence) of the Reformation in Britain has shown that the people of Britain were not, at least initially, keen to embrace the reforms of the Reformers.

There was a geographical factor involved here. The Reformation was fairly popular in London and other urban areas of southern England– the precise areas that had supported York over Lancaster in the 1400s and then supported Henry Tudor over Richard III. The Reformation was far from popular in rural England, especially in the north. The Pilgrimage of Grace was largely a northern rebellion.

Rod, I want to thank you for the work you’ve put in to covering this issue in the Catholic Church. That cannot have been fun. I’ve recently re-read some of your reporting from back in the early 2000s, and it is spot-on. I am a former Catholic (my family is still very active in the Church), and I cannot tell you much anger, disgust, and sorrow all of this fills me with. I live in the greater Boston area, so the report in PA is like PTSD for people up here. It is, truly, the banality of evil.

For all of the Catholics out there, I will pray for you. I am so, so sorry.

I’m seeing references to the PA scandal everywhere in the media, so it certainly can’t be said that the story isn’t getting any traction.

On CNN the AG accused Archbishop Weurl of lying:

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro told CNN on Sunday that Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, has lied to defend himself after a shocking grand jury report detailed decades of systemic sexual abuse by hundreds of Catholic priests in the state.

“Cardinal Wuerl is not telling the truth. Many of his statements in response to the Grand Jury Report are directly contradicted by the Church’s own documents and records from their Secret Archives. Offering misleading statements now only furthers the cover up.”

Axios: The report specifically alleges that Wuerl, who served as Pittsburgh’s bishop for 18 years, helped to cover up abuse and protect accused priests. Wuerl defended his actions in an interview with Fox 5 DC last week, saying, “I think I did everything that I possibly could.”

I’m not attempting to deflect from this horrible crisis, but is there any possibility that this sexual abuse crisis has infiltrated the Orthodox Church as well?

I’ve encountered social media posts from a few personal Orthodox friends and associates (especially former Catholics), and they declare their relief that they converted to Orthodoxy, and that this unfolding nightmare crisis is simple vindication of their religious journey.

[NFR: I suppose it is possible, and you won’t see me being triumphalist about any of this stuff. But I’ve been Orthodox for almost as long as I was Catholic, and you just don’t have the heavy gay vibe among Orthodox clergy that you do among Catholic clergy. I wish that weren’t true about the Catholic clergy in general, but it is. I asked a very conservative Orthodox priest friend of mine about whether we have as much to worry about as the Catholics do, and he said honestly, he didn’t think so. He said the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) had a gay problem with its hierarchs some years ago, but that has mostly been resolved. The seminary cultures are not gay-friendly, though there are some signs that that may be changing. I don’t think any church — not Orthodox, not Protestant — can afford to be complacent about abusers within its ranks, but I believe the culture within the Orthodox churches in this country make it less likely for them to find a place to hide. I welcome correction if I’m wrong. Believe me, I do. If we have this problem in our churches, then let’s clean out the rot at once. Better to suffer the sharp pain of that now than to endure the drawn-out agonies that the Catholic Church is suffering. — RD]

The presence of gay men in the Church is the most fundamental problem. The problem isn’t the Church organizational hierarchy. It’s who runs things. It makes this a gay scandal not a church scandal.

Anyone not calling for the mass identification and expulsion of gays from the church is therefore a useful idiot for the bishops and the status quo. You can’t separate this stuff from the nature of male homosexuals.

Spellman nominated McCarrick as a Domestic Prelate (mid-level Monsignor) at the age of 35,and sent him to run the Catholic University of Puerto Rico,the same year Cooke became auxiliary bishop.It looks like McCarrick was marked as a high-flyer from early on.

I side with those determined to avoid use of the word “gay” in the homosexual sense…it both abuses a word with another meaning and has connotations of same-sex sexual attraction being seen as entitled to gratification,making it an inaccurate description of homosexuals who know better.

Catholic prelates were not in the position to excommunicate the first (and only!) Catholic president for not putting the interests of the Church ahead of the interests of the nation.

Actually, there was a significant body of Trad/Conservative Catholic opinion which advocated just that — the point of having a Catholic president WAS, in their eyes, that he would subordinate the interested of the nation to the interest of the church. Just as, Cardinal Spelman bemoaned that he did not see how “the Catholic member of the Supreme Court could go along with” a decision over-ruling state subsidies to parochial schools.

Just because a lot of us know it would be treason, doesn’t mean Catholic prelates “were in no position” to advocate it.

That was a religious brother, not a priest, but it makes no difference in this context, I’m just clarifying the fact.

The thing about clerical immunity is that the Church, ever since there was Christian government, would strip a cleric of his status as cleric, for very serious crimes (such as sodomy) and after that he had no immunity and could be arrested and punished by the secular arm (the government). This is all through medieval church legislation and it is what happened in 1918 in the case I referred to above. The idea that the Church used to cover these things up is not accurate in all cases. She did of course have her own judicial and punitive machinery, and they worked (e.g. monastic houses that were actually prisons, where criminal clerics lived on bread and water and in these kinds of cases, NEVER returned to the ministry). She also had a blanket rule that nobody with a tendency to sodomitical sin could become or remain a cleric. It was regarded as radioactive, and guess what? It IS radioactive, as we now all see, from the post-Vatican II worldwide experiment the liberals have been running…

The experiment included letting them flood into the clerical institutes, covering up for them, promoting them, and treating the inevitable issues as matters of pastoral care FOR THE CRIMINALS. The common good was abandoned, no longer treated as primary. And this is perfect, fully-fledged, liberalism. Liberalism always treats the individual’s interests as primary, and the common good as essentially dispensable at best. Look around.

Once the nature of the problem is understood – look closely at the stats!) – getting rid of clerical celibacy won’t look like a solution. It’s a classic “Greek ideal” older men seducing young teen boys situation in the main. It isn’t even pedophilia, it’s pederasty.

The presence of gay men in the Church is the most fundamental problem. The problem isn’t the Church organizational hierarchy. It’s who runs things. It makes this a gay scandal not a church scandal.

Anyone not calling for the mass identification and expulsion of gays from the church is therefore a useful idiot for the bishops and the status quo.

I would expect this view to settle in and become the new orthodoxy (if you will) among those on the right in the RCC. It raises two questions: (1) Is it true? and (2) Would the measures proposed work?

(1) I don’t know. I suspect it’s at least more complicated, that career paths in the Catholic Church select for gay men and also distribute power in dysfunctional ways, and these factors interact to cause problems. Various comments on these threads have suggested some ways in which that might be happening.

(2) Any big turnover of personnel, even if done crudely through some kind of mass purge, plus a breaking up of current internal power and incentive structures — even if, again, done crudely and over-disruptively — would change things, and some of the changes might turn out to be for the better. At the least, a strong signal would be sent that the Church considers this all a big deal and is determined to change.

Unfortunately that’s not the only signal that would be sent. A mass purge of gay clerics, which would also necessarily involve some kind of internal inquisition to determine who’s gay, would reinforce much of what’s already wrong — and has been wrong for ages — with the Church’s reputation: that it’s discriminatory, backward-facing, medieval, prone to inquisitions, etc.

Of course, some Trads might like it for that very reason. But if you want to shrink the Church in an even bigger hurry, that’s the way to do it. Anyway, I don’t see how any such thing is going to happen, since it would pose a massive threat to the people who run the Church and yet would have to be ordered by the people who run the Church. It would be chickens voting for McNuggets.

@Louis E.:

I side with those determined to avoid use of the word “gay” in the homosexual sense…

Also not going to happen. If you can’t keep the word out of discussions even in a conservative forum like this one, you’ll never get it changed in the media and public discussion generally, unless gays themselves and their advocacy groups starting lobbying for the change for some reason. We’ve seen something like that happen before, notably with African Americans revolving through several preferred group designations, but the changes have always tracked with what the group itself seemed to be saying it wanted. The same would be true with gays; you’re not going to succeed at getting them generally referred to by some term(s) they would consider hostile.

Once a year we host seminarians and their director from St Tikhon’s at my church. They provide the choir for our Liturgy that Sunday and bring books and sacred music CDs to sell. There’s a luncheon for them, some speechifying, and a request for donations. Now, I won’t claim to have infallible gaydar but I have never gotten the slightest gay vibe from any of these young men. At worst some are a little nerdy. An there are even married seminarians among them.

Yes. And you know it is not enough to stop with the corrupt Bishops themselves – because I am convinced that a lot of the bad actors were administrative figures within dioceses as well (like the guys running the seminary). While some Bishops come and go, and some are figureheads who don’t actually do anything on their own, this stuff persisted.

That’s why its a homosexual scandal, not “just” a pedophile one. The pedophilia is lurid and but the homosex keeps the other kinds of abuse – poisoning the seminaries, ensuring moral laxity, creating an in-group-out-group mentality – going and allows room for the worst kind of abuse to happen.

The common good was abandoned, no longer treated as primary. And this is perfect, fully-fledged, liberalism. Liberalism always treats the individual’s interests as primary, and the common good as essentially dispensable at best. Look around.

Odd….. I’ve always heard that liberals are a bunch of collectivists who believe only in alleged common goods and will stomp all over individuals in pursuit of them.

I think it is worth pointing out that Engel’s book is published by “New Engel” publications. I.e., is self-published. That’s not to say what she says isn’t true. But I think it does make it inappropriate to cite her as an authority. Anyone can self-publish anything.

Ted, you miss my point. Do you think Talleyrand was the only sinning cleric in late 18th century France? Once again, the sorts of things we see going on today have been going on for a long time. Pederastic clergy were well known in the Middle Ages– there were even popes with “boys on the side”.
I am emphatically NOT trying to poo-poo outrage over these things. My point is rather that the present day is not unique in this respect.